SXSW 2018: Talking With Ethan Hawke and the Cast of Blaze

Hawke’s new film about Blaze Foley conjures the spirits of legendary Texas songwriters

By Bryan C. Parker

Published: March 26, 2018

Ben Dickey and Ethan Hawke play an intimate show at Gibson Showroom

Photo by Bryan C. Parker

While in Austin to attend and promote a screening of the new film Blaze, director Ethan Hawke, writer Sybil Rosen, and lead actor Ben Dickey made time for an interview ahead of a screening at the Paramount Theater during a busy South by Southwest week.

Ethan Hawke is a difficult guy to wrangle. Brimming with enthusiastic energy, he bounces from one topic to another, quoting Dennis Hopper and Tolstoy. But somehow, he’s not too difficult to follow. You’re with him every step of the way, aware of the thread that runs through his stream of consciousness.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve got the subject of his new film—songwriter and unsung troubadour Blaze Foley—on the brain, but it feels like Hawke is channeling a bit of the late musician’s poetic ramblings. “When you think about the way legends of songs are passed, it’s like a torch,” he explains. Blaze undertakes the task of imparting the tale of Blaze Foley (Ben Dickey), an infamous songwriter who was born in Arkansas, fell in love deeply with a young actress, lived in a literal tree house in the forests of Georgia, penned songs eventually recorded by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, and was shot and killed at age 39 in Austin, TX.

In hindsight, his life seems scripted since birth to be a film, or book, or simply a tall tale only retold in the pre-dawn hours while drinking on a porch. Doing it justice is no easy task, but Hawke and his cast triumph by pushing against narrative conventions. The film begins with the end, letting the audience know Blaze was killed right up front, and then swaying back and forth between three distinct time periods: Blaze’s early years living in Georgia with his lover Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat), a chaotic period in Austin which ultimately ends in his death, and a posthumous radio interview with Blaze’s friends Townes Van Zandt (Charlie Sexton) and Zee (Josh Hamilton).

Hawke lets music take a central role in the film—avoiding pure montage, but letting some songs play out fully while others waver in an out, mirroring and narrating the action of the characters. Beautifully shot and treated with a stylized, unified color palette, the film has the spiritual texture of the old country songs it holds in esteem. Motifs arise and then give way only to circle back stronger. Blaze is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking—a bleary-eyed joke about bad luck that starts as a laugh but leaves you crying into your beer.

“I think showing it here makes us more nervous than anywhere else,” Hawke confesses, in regard to the film’s screening at SXSW. “The story was born here,” he says. “This city has a certain ownership of the legend of Blaze Foley.” It’s true that Austin likely holds the most concentrated number of Blaze’s personal acquaintances and friends, among them Louis Black, co-founder of the Austin Chronicle and SXSW. Black also happens to be the guy who told him to read Rosen’s memoir, Living in a Tree in the Woods, on which the film is based. Before that, Hawke had imagined it as “a concert film”—a recreation of Blaze playing songs at the Austin Outhouse, one of the movie’s settings. Rosen, who says, “The thing I’m passionate about is the story,” brought to the project a narrative memoir about falling in love with and marrying Foley. And that changed everything.

Austin may be the source of the legend of Blaze Foley, but the film aims to introduce this story to a much larger audience, expanding the renown of the cult songwriter. Blaze already generated buzz when it premiered at Sundance, where star Ben Dickey won a jury prize for acting. Dickey makes his acting debut in Blaze, after working for years to find success as a musician in bands like Amen Booze-Rooster and Blood Feathers. Perhaps drawing on his own series of frustrations with the music industry, Dickey is electric on screen as he portrays Blaze’s unflinching distaste in the commercial trappings of a music career. “He didn’t like being a unit of sale; he was allergic to it,” says Hawke, adding that it prevented him “from succeeding on a level.” Rosen astutely points out that it also granted “a kind of freedom” many artists don’t have. Dickey balances Blaze’s fury by capturing his noted soft side in tender, romantic interactions with Sibyl or a gentle exchange with a young girl selling flowers.

“Music is magical, and it’s a language,” Dickey says, revealing that his musical vocabulary helped him navigate a newfound career in acting. He explains that understanding a scene involves grasping its “rhythm,” maybe knowing to wait “two beats” in a particular scene, for example. According to Dickey, the best musicians inhabit a mystical, hypnotized state. He cites Nina Simone, saying that when she plays she goes “to a towering, distant place.” It’s up to the audience to follow, if they’re up to it. For the musician-turned-actor, acting is the same. In his complex interpretation of Blaze, he succeeds admirably, transporting viewers with his drawling babble, hulking limp, and devilish grin.

Of the film’s many successes, the casting and the directing of a team of mostly nascent acting talents stand out. Beyond newcomer Dickey, Hawke recruited Charlie Sexton, musician and longtime guitarist in Bob Dylan’s band, to play Texas country legend Townes Van Zandt. Sexton delivers an inspired performance, managing a close approximation of the cadence and timbre of Van Zandt’s voice. And in a scene where Shawkat’s film version of Sibyl brings Blaze home to meet her traditional Jewish family, the real Sybil Rosen plays her own mother—a surreal visual echo where she relives her life from the perspective of her disapproving parent.

Blaze also features appearances by musicians Alynda Segarra (Hooray for the Riff Raff) and country great Kris Kristofferson, who portray Blaze’s sister and father respectively. In the film’s most heartrending scene, Blaze visits his elderly father, who is near the end of his life, to play music just like they used to as a traveling family band. This brief exploration of familial, specifically father-son, relationships is one of several powerful topics that transcend the immediate story. Blaze also addresses mental illness and addiction. But like Blaze’s skipping from town to town, the action never hangs around these topics too long to get preachy. Intelligently and poetically, the film asks more questions than it supplies answers.

In his sixth directorial credit, Hawke deserves recognition for eliciting powerful performances from a cast almost entirely comprised of non-actors. An ambitious and restless artist who has acted, directed, and authored several books, Hawke sees a kinship between disparate creative endeavors, saying it’s simply “people trying to turn their experience of being alive into a conversation.” For Hawke, the common thread is the acute experience of a brief human life. “When you see a great dancer,” he says, “you feel like, ‘F**k, they’re alive! Look at that! Look at what they’re doing! Or you see Jimi Hendrix ripping a solo, it feels like ‘We’re alive!’ Same thing if you see a Bergman movie, you’re like, ‘Right, guys! What the hell!?’”

Rosen backs him up, adding, “And it makes you feel alive.” As a playwright, actress, and novelist, she too has experience with diverse forms of artistic expression. “Sometimes you have to wait for the story to tell you what form,” she says of her process. “They speak to me, if I’m lucky, if I stay open, and am really listening,” she says, adding, “Blaze was like that, too.”

To really hear Blaze Foley, you’ll need patience and careful attention. His story and his identity can’t be summed up or whittled down. The film’s nonlinear, rambling structure parallels the arc of his life. Even as Blaze’s legacy unfolds, the telling and retelling double back—at first Rosen, and now Hawke, enter a conversation with the faded memory of a songwriter. These echoes of people are real-life ghosts. And this story about them is a song. The film’s parts are woven and intertwined like a guitar riff and a melody, a verse and a chorus.

“I know it sounds funny,” Hawke says reflectively, “but Blaze lives in these songs.” He goes on with wistful admiration, “They’re so well built that he put his spirit in them. You actually meet Blaze when you hear these songs.”

With the benefit of outstanding performances and sharp writing, Hawke, Dickey, and Rosen bring those songs to life.

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